The revisionist historian David Irving, whose professional reputation was demolished in a libel action 14 months ago, launched an appeal yesterday against the judgment that branded him a racist Holocaust denier who misrepresented historical evidence for his own rightwing political agenda.

His counsel, Adrian Davies, argued that the findings of Mr Justice Gray were wrong and unjust based on the evidence.

The 63-year-old author had sued Penguin Books and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Mr Irving claimed that it destroyed his livelihood and generated waves of hatred against him.

In his judgment Mr Justice Gray decided that the defamatory remarks made against him in the book were substantially true. He ruled: "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with rightwing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."

Faced with a £2m bill for the defendants' legal costs, Mr Irving funded the appeal with the help of contributions from supporters, many in the US.

In his application for permission to appeal, Mr Davies told Lord Justice Pill, Lord Justice Mantell, and Lord Justice Buxton, in the court of appeal, that the charge of distorting the evidence lay at the heart of the case.

He said Mr Irving had to persuade the court that the trial judge should not have found that the defence of justification was made out in relation to the accusation that the author was a liar. "It's not that he's a nasty person who holds horrible views and knows lots of people who hold even more horrible views."

Mr Davies said Mr Irving had never denied that the Nazis and their collaborators had murdered millions of Jews. "I say that nowhere in the entire core of Mr Irving's work, in an authorial life of nearly 40 years, when he has given countless broadcasts and public performances, has he said anything which remotely began to suggest that he thought the Nazis did a jolly good thing - or even an excusable thing - in rounding up all the Jews in eastern Europe and putting them into camps, that it was in any way excusable." What Mr Irving had claimed, said Mr Davies, was that the extermination of the Jews in occupied Europe was not a systematic German state policy until 1943. He said Mr Irving's work should be assessed in the context of the evidence reasonably available to him while he was writing his books, such as Hitler's War published in the 1970s.

"Over the years more and more information has come into the public domain. History has moved on and archives have been opened."

Mr Davies said he would argue that the judge's findings on specific issues were wrong as a matter of history, or that Mr Irving came to a reasonable alternative position to the established views.

Mr Davies said he would also rely on the fact that the defendants had made no attempt to prove Professor Lipstadt's claim that Mr Irving had been scheduled to appear at a conference in Sweden in 1992 along with members of the extremist Islamic groups Hamas and Hizbollah.

He said there was a world of difference between being accused of indulging in partisan and biased polemics, and consorting with violent terrorists.